- Alternate Character Interpretation: Entirely deliberately with the Exile on both the Colonel and Lionsmith paths. Especially when their view of each other is contrasted. Is a follower of the Lionsmith a heroic and idealistic rebel out to change the world and get revenge for their mother's death, or are they a violent anarchist pushing the world into deadly chaos for their own amusement? Is a follower of The Colonel a heroic and dutiful hunter of monsters and a keeper of the peace, or a callous and underhanded agent of repressive colonial authority?
- Critical Dissonance: While major reviewers and review sites have nigh-unanimously praised the game for its deep, rich story and lore and claiming it has engaging gameplay, player response has been considerably more mixed, with detractors claiming that the game suffers from extreme Trial-and-Error Gameplay due to a complete lack of any form of tutorial or hint system.
- Demonic Spiders: Curses. If you fail to defeat them during expeditions, they will eat your stat or followers, and you need high intensity influences to defeat them in a very short time. It's not too bad in the old versions since you are guaranteed to defeat them with 10 aspect during expedition. However, the introduction of the wounds system intentionally cap all success rate of expedition obstacles bypass chance to 90%, which means that a bad roll will force you to solve these. Not to mention that nearly all of the higher level expeditions, including nearly all of the repeatable ones all have curses as obstacles. This is made doubly worse by the fact that stats are now hard-capped and cannot be raised further after that, even if you lose those stats from curses.
- Fan Nickname: The Lithomachy or the Extirpation for the slaying of the Gods-From-Stone.
- Game-Breaker:
- Painting does everything. For starters, maxing it out is relatively easy compared to maxing Health or Reason, and during the time you max it your paintings will provide a modest income. Once you've gotten the final tier, your paintings will be selling like hotcakes, and if you go all out can make up to 10 funds in a single pass, which is substantial at any point in the game. Painting also gives you good alternatives to managing your hunters, since you can spend Notoriety to increase the value of your paintings by a large amount. It can even help with Dread, Fascination, and other nasty mental problems by using them as Inspiration, letting you work out your issues with art rather than suffer. On top of this, maxed out Painting gives you the ability to make Masterpieces, which are paintings of the Hours. You can do this by setting up a Painting, slotting in four Passions, using a piece of lore as inspiration and then using a corresponding pigment. Creating a masterpiece means you can use it as a Tool in rites, which is one of the only ways to force the game to give you a Lore-relevant tool. Of all the vocations, painting is easily the strongest, and abusing it can help secure an ending. Painting is so strong that it's set to be nerfed into offering lower rewards if you spam it too much, but it's still incredibly useful.
- The Sunset Rite and the Rite of the Map's Edge are two of the most useful rites in the game because they use Influences, which you can get a ton of by dreaming, instead of Ingredients or Instruments for the sacrifice slot. They're also two of the four rites that you can gain without needing to go on expeditions, thus you're guaranteed to get them quite early on without relying on the RNG expedition loot table. And on top of that, Dread and Fascination are Influences too, which means you can destroy them relatively easily.
- Originally, betraying a follower did not generate Notoriety. This allowed for a steady flow of Human Resources by recruiting hirelings for one Fund, then immediately betraying and imprisoning them, instead of depleting your limited supply of followers or abducting passerby, which can fail and generates Notoriety. This has been patched: now, imprisoning hirelings does generate Notoriety. It's still pretty cheap when you get down to it, especially if you're on a path that requires human sacrifice.
- The pause function coupled with simply holding cards is incredibly potent. Verbs using magnets can't pull cards while time is paused, they also can't pull the one you are holding. Verbs with magnets also have a short grace period before they pull after appearing. This all combined means that you can easily prevent a card of your choice from being pulled simply by holding it, pausing time when you need to interact with other cards, and then grabbing the card you want to prevent being pulled before unpausing. This allows you some leeway in deciding what card Verbs will pull, and if you only have one, prevent it from being pulled at all. Sadly patched out; now a magnet verb will rip any card out of your hand if it wants to.
- Dancing at the Ecdysis Club is very powerful. You need to supply Heart or Moth to work via Ability and/or Influence slots, the latter of which will be consumed. "Inspired Work" at the club, by dancing with a total of 3+ Heart or Moth, gives extra rewards, including some rare books as well as Bronze and Silver Spintria without ever needing to do commissions, which you can hoard or sell for some modest cash. The downside is that you need to find both Sulochana and the Ecdysis Club first and some legacies simply cannot get this job, but it's great way to handle things like Restlessness, Dread and Fascination since those are Influences too. In fact, combine with painting and you can use the Contentment it generates to dance at the club by just alternating the two actions.
- Genius Bonus: There are a wide variety of references to mythology and real history in the midst of the made up occult lore. Not to mention the etymology of calling Lantern summons Hinter.
- Goddamned Bats:
- Restlessness and the resulting Despair, especially in the early to midgame. Worse, you have few ways to counteract them (unless you are an Artist,) as the Peaceful Day event is random, and Dreaming of Health gives more Fleeting Memories than Contentment. You can purchase a tincture of opium by "Dreaming" of Funds, which always produces Contentment, but also has a chance to cause an Affliction or, ironically, a Despair token.
- Later on, Fascination actually becomes a greater concern, as your Temptation stops producing regular Restlessness once it has reached the Third Mark and the only counter to Fascination is Dread or a Rite. Later patches however added the ability to use Fleeting Memories (which were mostly useless before) to help counteract Fascination.
- Fascination is also dangerous to use as an influence, because "Fascination breeds": using it as an influence in anything triggers a chance to create more Fascination. It's a useful influence, especially as a catch-all for improving Lore, but using it recklessly will result in mountains of Fascination just waiting for the Season of Visions to end your game.
- Good Bad Bugs: The Tug-of-War glitch, in which a card (usually Reputation) that is getting pulled in by two effects would bounce between them until one ran out of time and ended.
- Scrappy Mechanic:
- The lack of any automatic card sorting is considered to be a big pain for players. The game board can get very busy quickly, with all your cards splayed out all over the place. This means hunting for that one card you need can be a huge pain in the ass, especially if you need it immediately. The Nintendo Switch version alleviates this somewhat, eliminating the virtual tabletop in favor of a menu-driven list of cards which can be filtered to show only relevant cards for the current verb.
- When the game originally launched, there was no indication of what card could be played in any given position. Clicking on the empty slot would tell you the type of card needed, but that then required you to check various cards to see if they had that type, and then trying them one-by-one to see if they actually fit. A patch later made it so that clicking on an empty slot tells you what kind of card type is required, and then makes any card that fits glow to indicate their usefulness.
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